The Venetian's Proposal

Something in his look made her go on to explain, ‘I suddenly realised I’d been a widow for longer than I’d been a wife.’

Releasing her hand, he queried, ‘How long were you married?’

‘Not quite a year…’

Perhaps it was too much wine that loosened her tongue, or maybe, at long last, the time had come when she felt it a relief to be able to talk about the past.

Whichever, she found herself opening up to a perfect stranger in a way she hadn’t been able to open up to anyone, except John.

‘Jeff and I had a traditional white wedding on my twenty-first birthday.’

‘But you’d lived together before that?’

‘Virtually all our lives… Oh, I see what you mean. No, we hadn’t lived together in that sense.’

Seeing his slight frown, she explained, ‘Jeff’s parents were my parents too. My foster parents. They had been my grandmother’s friends for a number of years, and they took care of me while she was in hospital and after she died.’

‘How old were you then?’

‘Just turned five.’

‘And your husband?’

‘He was a few months older, and their only child.’

‘They never tried to officially adopt you?’

‘I think they would have liked to. They had hoped for more children, but they were well past middle-age when Jeff was born, so they would have been considered too old.’

‘You had no grandfather?’

‘He’d died the previous year.’

‘What about your natural parents?’

‘I’d never known them, and one day, having realised that most of my peers had a mummy and daddy, I asked my grandmother why I didn’t. She sat me on her knee and gave me a cuddle while she explained that mine had gone away. Because of something one of my little friends had said, I translated “gone away” as “gone to heaven”, and over the years my foster parents, no doubt thinking it was for the best, allowed me to go on believing they were dead.

‘Then when I reached sixteen, perhaps as an awful warning, they decided I was old enough to know the truth. My natural mother, whose name was Helen, was my grandmother’s only child. From the age of thirteen she’d been a bit wild, and she was barely sixteen when she discovered she was pregnant.

‘It seems she wanted to have an abortion, but my grandmother was horrified and insisted on her going through with the pregnancy.

‘She hated the whole idea of motherhood, and even before I was born blamed me for spoiling her life. When I was only a few weeks old she disappeared, leaving my grandmother to take care of me.’

‘Your grandmother must have been quite young when she died?’

‘She was in her middle fifties. She had some kind of minor operation that went tragically wrong.’

Running lean fingers over his smooth chin, Dominic remarked thoughtfully, ‘So, with having the same parents, you and your husband must have been brought up like sister and brother?’

Made a little uncomfortable by the bluntness of the question, she answered, ‘We were always very close. Though we spent most of our time together—we even went to the same school—we never argued or fell out… I can’t ever remember not loving Jeff, and it was the same for him.’ Smiling fondly, she added, ‘He once told me he’d loved me since I was a scrawny five-year-old with big solemn eyes and a pigtail.’

‘Didn’t close friends think it strange that you never quarrelled like other siblings?’

She answered truthfully, ‘I don’t recall having a really close friend, apart from Jeff, until I got to college. As children, our parents didn’t encourage us to mix much, and really we never seemed to need anyone else.’

‘What about when you grew into adults?’

‘You mean did we stay friends?’

‘I mean when did you become lovers?’

‘Jeff wanted us to sleep together as soon as I’d turned eighteen.’

‘But you didn’t?’

She shook her head. ‘No… Though after he’d died I almost wished we had. It seemed such a waste of three years… But although our parents were kind, they were quite strict and God-fearing, and they seriously disapproved of anyone having sex outside marriage.’

‘So what happened?’

‘Jeff suggested we should get married, but we were due to start college and neither of us had any money. Eventually he decided to approach our parents and tell them we loved each other and wanted to be together.

‘When he did, they said if we waited until we’d finished college—to be sure we weren’t making a mistake—they would give us their blessing and pay for a white wedding and all the trimmings. That way they could be proud of us.’

Seeing Dominic’s expression, she admitted, ‘It must seem terribly old-fashioned, but we’d been brought up to respect their wishes, and living under their roof meant accepting their standards. Apart from anything else they’d been very good to me, and I didn’t want to let them down, so finally we promised to wait.’

His grey eyes intent, Dominic asked, ‘Surely a promise like that went by the board once you got into student accommodation?’

‘The college was only just down the road, and in the circumstances it seemed sensible to keep on living at home.’

Dominic’s flicker of a smile said it all.

Disturbed by that smile, she found herself defending the decision. ‘It was what our parents wanted us to do. They said some of the students were a wild bunch and we’d be better off at home.’

‘I would have bet on it.’

Before Nicola could make any comment, he pursued smoothly, ‘So you finished college and had a white wedding… Then what?’

Unused to dissembling, she spoke the exact truth. ‘I moved into Jeff’s room.’

‘Didn’t you find being under your parents’ roof somewhat…inhibiting?’

She had, more so than Jeff.

A little defensively, she explained, ‘It wasn’t how I would have chosen to do things. We’d both graduated with honours—Jeff in Design Engineering, me in Modern Languages and Business Studies—but neither of us had managed to get a job… In any case our parents, who had lived in rented accommodation all their lives, wanted us to stay with them until we could afford to start buying a place of our own, and Jeff was in agreement…

‘I know that must sound a bit staid and unexciting…’

His voice almost angry, Dominic said, ‘It sounds soul-destroying.’